Posted
by
timothy
on Saturday March 21, 2015 @04:42PM
from the but-that's-unpossible dept.

New submitter PensacolaSlick writes that [Patrick Moore a], co-founder of Greenpeace, and seven-year director of Greenpeace International, with other very pro-environmental credentials, has come out with a brief rationale for why he is "skeptical that humans are the main cause of climate change and that it will be catastrophic in the near future." He argues instead that in a historical context, human activity has saved the planet, declaring that "at 400 parts per million, all our food crops, forests, and natural ecosystems are still on a starvation diet for carbon dioxide."
(Consider the source, which according to the New York Times is "the primary American organization pushing climate change skepticism.") Moore breaks with what might be expected of a Greenpeace founder as well in that he is currently chair of Allow Golden Rice.

Modern Greenpeace is doing things like defacing ancient monuments thousands of years old [mic.com] to spread propaganda. If this guy WERE with Greenpeace any time recently I would have cause to question his sanity and/or motives... instead he seems like a guy that actually cares about the environment instead of money or publicity.

If that strike is destroying monuments thousands of years old and causing irreparable damage to a very fragile desert ecosystem - yes, absolutely I would be strongly against ANY entity that did that, but more importantly didn't even consider it to be a problem.

Thanks for the 45 years of environmental activism, it was nice knowin' ye.

Greenpeace has not helped the environment in any meaningful way for at least two decades now. I consider helping them to be morally as questionable as supporting human trafficking, especially since you are taking away funds to help groups that actually help the environment instead of themselves (like the Nature Conservancy).

If that strike is destroying monuments thousands of years old and causing irreparable damage to a very fragile desert ecosystem - yes, absolutely I would be strongly against ANY entity that did that, but more importantly didn't even consider it to be a problem.

I take it then that you'll be pretty negative toward the American administration who oversaw the destruction or loss of a substantial slice of cultural artifacts held in trust on behalf of the entire Iraqi civilization.

"The images you are seeing on television you are seeing over and over and over. And it's the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase. And you see it 20 times. And you think, my goodness, were there that many vases?" Rumsfeld told reporters. "Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?"

This from the man who likely repeated the phrase "weapons of mass destruction" times beyond measure. My goodness, is it possible that there were any WMD in the whole country?

the true figure was around 15,000 items, including 5,000 extremely valuable cylinder seals

Perhaps Rumsfeld hates all museums with the same uniform, searing passion, but I suspect he might have summarized the matter differently if 15,000 items walked out of the Smithsonian, including personal artifacts brought over to American on the Mayflower that were already so venerable they predated Constantine.

Now to deal with the article at hand:

If this trend continued, the carbon dioxide level would have become too low to support life on Earth.

If he thinks this trend could have continued deep into the extirpation of the chlorophyllosphere, he's badly in need of that new ultrasound treatment used to cure Alzheimer's disease in the mice model.

Perpetuating famine in Zambia by spreading rumors about the dangers of GMOs was a pretty big strike. I'd like to believe that Greenpeace's role in it was exaggerated, that their position isn't really so offensive to famine-stricken countries planting corn that's modified to grow quicker and more dense, so I searched their website for "Zambia." This came up: http://www.greenpeace.org/inte... [greenpeace.org].

Some gems from the article:

Disgracefully, hunger and desperation have become the Genetic Engineering industry's best tools to penetrate the developing world's food supply.

And I know for a fact he has been playing up his "greenpeace founder" credentials for a couple of decades now. He's uses it as a cudgel every time some corporation needs to fight regulation of their pollution. The guy is a hack and as usual, the dumb-as-rocks slashdot editors fell for it.

Well, I give him his due in that he took part in some of Greenpeace's earliest activities. And I agree with him on Golden Rice and GMO foods. And he *does* have scientific credentials as an ecologist, although that doesn't mean he's not a crackpot -- especially when he weighs in on areas outside his expertise.

1. 99.9% of Slashdot commenters are NOT Climate Scientists.2. Probably 90% don't even have education in areas remotely related to Climate Science.3. 90% are the posts seem to cite Skeptical Science in order to prove their point.4. Skeptical Science is run by a Cartoonist.5. The.01% of Slashdot commenters that ARE qualified to offer a valid opinion...don't do so on Slashdot. (U

Appeal to Authority is a fallacy. You don't have to be an "expert" to be able to evaluate written material.

3. 90% are the posts seem to cite Skeptical Science in order to prove their point.

And you're assuming without evaluation that all skeptical science is wrong and all non-skeptical science is not. Are you totally dense? There is no non-skeptical science. All science must be skeptical. Because some IPCC stooges are not, we have the problem we have!

the typical ATAF involves "X is an expert, we should listen to X".the post he's refuting is making a related claim "X is not an expert, he is a cartoonist. We should NOT listen to X."It's an inversion of the typical ATAF.

The key point is that scientific facts are true regardless of the status of X as an expert or non-expert.In this case, X is a cartoonist, but X has more than a typical laypersons familiarity with the topic, even if he isn't a lead

More like his wallet took a sharp turn to the right https://en.wikipedia.org/ [wikipedia.org] "Moore has earned his living since the early 1990s primarily by consulting for, and publicly speaking for a wide variety of corporations and lobby groups" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]. So why was he in Greenpeace in the first place, likely pursuing the opposite sex. Caring sharing community activities often have a preponderance of the fairer sex (they are referred to as the 'fairer sex' for a reason) http://siteresources.worldbank... [worldbank.org].

No, the green revolution was a result of government research efforts that the private sector is too short-sighted to invest in.

Farmers are stupid sod-kickers who do ignorant things like kill prairie dogs out of paranoia, when actually the little critters help to irrigate the soil with their diggings.

The internet was rejected by the private sector. AT&T saw it as competition for their business model which was based on telephones. The right, which fetishizes the private sector, is not good at disruptive i

Calhoun's point of view is pretty much the same as the righties running today. The same rhetoric about "appeasement", the same paranoia about their way of life being destroyed. That is the essence of the right, and it is hopelessly backwards, on the wrong side of history.

You don't seem to know your history very well. As already stated, Lincoln supported emancipation for reasons of his own, which had absolutely nothing to do with "equality". His reason for wanting to end the keeping of black slaves was so they could eventually be removed from the continent entirely.

And to be honest, I don't know a single person who holds Calhoun's views today.

Are you trying to suggest that Democrats have never been right-wing? The fact that Southern segregationists were Democratic prior to the modern reformulation of the parties does not make John Calhoun any less right-wing. I don't know what you're trying to suggest with the Lincoln quote, that has nothing to do with anything. Though, admittedly, this whole thread is nothing but mud-slinging... maybe you're just trying to fit in.

Take John C. Calhoun [wikipedia.org]: "he became a greater proponent of states' rights, limited government, nullification and free trade".

What does this have to do with today's right? John C Calhoun was part of the same party that Obama is now part of. And no, the parties didn't switch spectrum, rather all of them have changed their stances on certain subjects. Remember it was still the Democrats that were largely opposed to civil rights during the 50's and 60's (for example, it was a Democrat governor who called in the national guard to keep black students out of Central High School in Arkansas.)

The biggest change a lot of people refer to happened during the 80's under the Raegan. Prior to Raegan, Democrats were staunchly opposed to communism (Kennedy and Johnson for example) and somehow the modern Democrat party moved away from that hard line stance (Greenpeace is an example of that, and Patrick Moore cited the organization as looking favorably upon communism as an environmental solution as part of his reasoning for leaving.) At the same time, a huge portion of the US population shifted to the right, which was mainly those that were still hard-line opposed to communism and were disillusioned by the Jane Fonda types of that era.

And yes, during the 80's, communism was still a pretty serious threat to the west, it only stopped being so after its biggest backer (the USSR) decided they have had enough of it and finally dropped the Iron Curtain. And now to this day, several major Democratic figureheads like to claim that the Red Scare was just a big farce, communism really isn't so bad and just needs to be done right, etc.

However neither party has been in favor of either discrimination or slavery since at least the late 70's. But prior to then, Democrats were the pro-discrimination party, and prior to at least the 1900's they were still the pro-slavery party.

Out of curiosity, do you have a source for any of this that has voted Democrat since Kennedy?
It's a lot of horseshit. The Dixiecrats, who favored segregation, largely became Republicans in the 70's. That's why Reagans first campaign speech after the convention was in Mississippi on the topic of "states' rights." This is code.
And the Dixiecrats abandoned the Democrats because they supported integration! You're engaged in a long winded and grossly distorted fallacy of guilt by association.

Wouldn't "outproducing your competition" lower the market price and kill your profits? (Isn't that why cartels often arise?) And accusing the left of "trying to destroy the abundance" when communism calls for a post-scarcity society seems kind of contradictory.

Moron, science is their job, they go on working on science in the same exact way they already are, just different science. Of course on the other hand the fossil fuelers with trillions of dollars locked the the ground and the ability to get it out and sell it rapidly disappearing and no other alternatives for them. So on balance a scientist get paid tens of thousands of dollars to do science going on simply to do other science (because according to you, no global warming, zero need for weather science, fuc

I... don't know where to begin with this figure. If "by 2010" you mean the amount which has been cumulatively spent on climate research since the United States was first conceived as a country, I probably would still not believe you. But maybe, at the outside. And only if you adjusted for inflation and you included work to address the 1930's Dust Bowl as "climate research."

That is a staggeringly ridiculous number, and the fact that you would present it here as though it were true, as though it were a plausible thing to say, represents a deep myopia. The total R&D budget for the US for 2015 is $135B, most of that goes to defense research.

I went to Wood for Trees and plotted GISTEMP, HADCRUT4, RSS lower trop. and UAH lower trop. for the last 20 years. You can see the graph here. [woodfortrees.org] The only one even close to showing no warming is RSS. They have some issues because the satellite they use is out of fuel and can't keep its orbit so they have to adjust for that.

Your other 3 points are just climate science denier memes that don't stand up in the real world. 2) Climate models aren't expected to predict the short term variability of things like EN

I don't agree with his latest position, not at all actually, but I'm with in on that one.

More specifically, the "green movement" has become a harbour for all the malcontents who don't so much care about the environment as despise the society we live in. These people see global warming not as a problem, but as the solution: what will force society to change its ways.

But greed inevitably involves the environment. Example: the gold rush, which ruined the pristine environment that had existed unchanged by the American Indians for centuries. Also logging, clearcutting all that priceless old growth for "plush" toilet paper, or other silly vain trifles.

Everybody loved Greenpeace when it was saving whales. Then it didn't just take a turn to the left, but to the radical anti-human left. Now it reflexively opposes anything that might promote humanity, like changing fuels from fossil to nuclear if, perchance, their own climate scenario were proved true.

Though I do believe humans are doing a good job of trashing the environment, I have always felt like Global Warming was being used as a scare tactic, much like those "Repent and be saved!" guys that stand on street corners and preach about the end of days.

Is Global Warming happening now? Yep, it appears it is. Is mankind the only cause of this phenomenon? I'm not 100% sure on that, and if we don't keep looking to see what's really going on, we may be in for a rude awakening in the not too distant future. when though our best efforts at curbing carbon emmisions, we still end up screwed.

Pretty much my veiw point. Does human activity cause some manifestations in the weather that are excacerbated by current climate change, I'm sure it does. Is "global warming" 100% human caused, I doubt it very much. To many conflicting arguments as far as I can tell.

There's nothing stopping (and in fact, it seems almost a certainty) that Man-made Global Warming is real *and* is being used as a scare tactic by some people.

When billions are presented with the same crisis, you can expect there to be a multitude of different responses, including those who seek to capitalize upon it by denying its existence, and those seeking to capitalize upon it by promoting its existence.

In the last Ebola crisis, I'm certain there were people recruiting for their Church as a cure ("it's

Does climate change happen naturally? Yes? Is the current experience of climate change natural? No. This stuff isn't up for debate; it's as established science as evolution and planetary motion. Unlike evolution, though, there are a lot of people with a financial interest in the status quo and therefore strive (often honestly) to show that AGW is not true.

This stuff certainly IS up for debate. There's always a danger when it comes to a majority of scientists agreeing with something and then having government money, and special interests ram it down everyone's throats.

Look at what happened in the 70s with the damn low fat craze. Everyone went low fat and Type II diabetes has gone through the roof.

I'll stay a skeptic till there is irrefutable science. And don't bother posting any links, cause for every article yo find, I can find one with a dissenting opini

"It is possible to debate this"/= "This is not settled science". Yes, I dare say you will be able to blether for as long as I can. But here's the thing. Science converges on the truth. Yes, it might be wrong. But by definition you cannot know better than the scientific consensus, especially not on something as well scrutinised as AGW. So, in short, you can shove your "scepticism" up your ass, because I don't care and your opinion is of no relevance.

You've hit on one of the main issues with Global Warming. How much of it is a man made issue and how much of it is due to natural causes? There are a few reports that suggest that the ice caps on Mars are slowly receding too, so it may be in part due to changing solar activity. I see the next battle being exactly how much human activities are to blame.

Having said that, the debate over Global Warming is distracting in how it steers the conversation away from all of the other problems man-made pollution are causing. CO2 emissions appear to be the main factor in ocean acidification. Particulate pollution is a main factor in changing evaporation rates, rainfall frequency and lung disease. Nitrogen oxides contribute to acid rain. Heavy metals and radioactive metals from coal have a number of adverse health effects. Improper fracking installations can contaminate ground water. Tailing ponds can leak and contaminate surface water.

All of this seems to have taken a back seat. To be honest, I wonder if energy companies are quietly happy about this. Global Warming has so many shades of gray that it is easy for energy interests to dismiss it and for people to believe them. Traditional pollution is a lot more black and white, making it hard to wave away as quack science. Changing the conversation is a fantastic way to stop talking about it.

Because if we were talking about how 40-year old coal and oil fired power plants skirt modern pollution controls by doing upgrades under the guise of "repairs", allowing them to keep their grandfathered pollution limits, I think people would be really pissed. What's the point of companies like GE and Hitachi advertising their modern cleaner power plants during the nightly news when nobody is forced to buy them? If that was the center of topic, there would be a better chance of it changing.

I read the study on the Martian polar ice caps. I also read that all the planets in the inner solar system are heating up at the same rate. When you mention stuff like this, the Global Warming guys flip and jump down your throat that you can't use data from other planets to predict what's happening on Earth.

There was also a great article on how the polar ice caps are refreezing at the fastest rate ever.

The problem here is that the people on the side of man-made global warming think every mention of the fact that this may be a natural phenomenon or just temporary automatically makes you some kind of industry shill. That is far from the case. I think it's the job of every scientist to continuously question and test. No one should assume man-made global warming is 100% truth at this point.

And I do agree that is distracting poeple from many other problems. I hear combating global warming all the time, but no one EVER talks about cleaning up the Great Pacific Garage Patch [wikipedia.org]. The average Global Warming advocate that would call you an industry shill, doesn't even know what the Garbage Patch is. Or they don't know that Wind Turbines for electricity production kill bats by the thousands. Or that the Toyota Prius battery factory in Canada is slowly destroying the environment around it.

When I mention any of this stuff, they get outraged, and continue to call me an industry shill. Which I am not. I'm trying to show them that Global Warming is NOT the greatest crisis to face mankind. Cause before that the greatest crisis was power lines causing cancer. And before that, it was acid rain. And before that was the Ozone Layer. Before that, a new ice age was coming. There's always some crisis out there that the media brings to the forefront. Global Warming is just the latest attempt to sensationalize headlines, use "carbon neutral" as a marketing term to sell products and keep you scared that this crisis is far worse than the last one that was supposed to wipe us out and didn't.

Things like the polar ice is a great example - there is a local phenomena of sea ice generation, but it doesn't refute the bigger picture of constant warming ocean and land temperatures. It is being studied by a number of teams, and will eventually expand our knowledge of the planet and its systems, but it doesn't change any of the argument to date.

I also want to say that you're not being terribly consistent when you complain others call you 'shill', and you then go on to give the 'sheeple' argument that society is being manipulated into a crisis mentality to simply sell some products. That's being hugely insulting and completely disingenuous to your skepticism. It shows the bias and lack of understanding you're investing into the sceptical position that you've decided to take.

You could take your ozone issue as an example - it wasn't just some crackpot genius marketing idea to sell new aerosol cans, it was a genuine issue that still effects everything everything in the lower southern hemisphere. It could have been catastrophic, but action was taken and the problem has stabilised (and begun to recover). I would also argue that most environmentalists are fully aware of issues like the Pacific Garbage Patch, and there are plenty of active campaigns to reduce waste in all forms. However, there is an element of relative urgency in all things, and just like you wouldn't complain to the doctor about the scratch on your arm when you need to be discussing your cancer treatment, plenty of people are naturally focusing on the perceived bigger environmental threat of global warming,

It's somewhat important to know how much is man-made vs natural (a question we are not very close to answering).

I think a way more important question though is, how much warming is too much? We know from historical temperature data that the warming we are supposed to see now in about 200 years, will be still a bit below the medieval warm period.

But if it continued beyond that, is there some point ay which we should consider drastic measures like climate engineering? I don't see a lot of studies that seem to be able to predict at all what happens as the climate gets slowly warmer over time (at least they have done a terrible job at predicting that so far).

We should not forget that the most dangerous thing of all would be to have the climate cooling, so to whatever degree man affects the climate, we should try to err on the side of warming. Energy is life, a frozen Earth is death for many.

Ocean acidification and upper atmosphere particulate pollution are anything but localized. The former is leading to widespread worldwide disruption of the seafood industry, the latter is leading to widespread drought conditions.

Most of the rest are regional at the least, with pollution traveling possibly thousands of kilometers. As example, air pollution from China is being detected in increasing levels along the North American west coast. Heavy metals dumped in streams in Montana can be detected in Miss

Not to mention the global overpopulation problem. We're going to get to a point where the world won't be able to feed the human population with the avialable resources of the planet, long before we hit a crisis with global warming.

I don't fucking get it: you believe that global warming is happening, yet you reject the theory that scientists have put forth to explain the phenomenon. A theory well grounded in science, that makes predictions that we see coming true every day, and that the vast majority of experts actually working in the field subscribe to. A phenomenon for which no other plausible (at this juncture) theory has been put forth.

Do you ever feel the need to examine why you so strongly want to disbelieve the theory?

The theory, as put forth, does a relatively good job of explaining MOST of the things we are seeing at present. The model has some issues with the Mideval mini ice-age and the peroid of significantly reduced polar ice that happened after that. It did a horrible job of predicitng the polar ice refreezing that happened 2 or 3 years ago.

And right now, the theory is being used as an excuse for everything. We had a record hurrincane year 2 years ago. We actually went through the whole alphabet and then some. Scinetists were all over the news telling us this is a result of global warming, since the oceans are now warmer. They said it fit the model to a tee, and that it's just going to get worse from year out. Last year was the mildest hurricane season they had seen in a long time. Global Warming was being used by meteorologists as the cause for the polar vortexes that dropped temperatures down into the single and negative digits.

So, yeah, global warming has been well studied, but it's not the damn be-all, end-all for how this planet does shit. Everythig bad that happens on the planet is not the result of the CO2 levels in the air. And all the work you do to try and save our asses from rising temparatures will be meaningless when the Yellowstone Supervolcanoe erupts and takes out half the country, which "well established science" said should have erupted close to 20 years ago.

I was a research biologist for a number of years, and it sickens me how many people these days make the data fit the theory, rather than making the theory fit the data

Like I said in a previous post, infra-red imaging of the inner planets in our solar system shows them heating up at a rate similar to Earth. But, say that out loud and people like you friggin flip out.

It did a horrible job of predicitng the polar ice refreezing that happened 2 or 3 years ago.

Good, because if the models predicted events that did not happen, that would be a bad sign for them. The "polar ice refreezing" that you are refering to didn't happen. Polar ice did rebound from a record low, which it was widely expected to do. In fact, every record low polar ice year is followed by a few years that are higher than the record low before until we reach the next record low. However, the overall trend is still downward.

Global Warming was being used by meteorologists as the cause for the polar vortexes that dropped temperatures down into the single and negative digits.

From my understanding, that is correct. Warming in the arctic is chang

I was referring to the claim in the article, where he said: "[IPCC's] mandate is to consider only the human causes of global warming, not the many natural causes changing the climate for billions of years", which is simply not true. Possible non-human causes have been looked at, and quantified, and they come short of explaining the temperature rise.

3. They do, but it varies from plant to plant. During the late Pleistocene, CO2 concentrations were 25% to 50% lower than at present, declining to values of 180 ppm during glacial periods. Studies have been done on plants growing with less then 50ppm (to find fast growing breeds). I would say under 30ppm would be the breaking point but could be as low as 25ppm...or even 15 on some high altitude/slow growing tree strains like firs and redwoods (some plants can go much lower but only like 5% of the ones we know of).

Yay UCSD and Roger Revelle! More charts [ucsd.edu] of the Keeling Curve, which passed 400 three months ago. "1700 to Present" is my favorite.

I'm still totally amazed people can't look at a before and after of the summer ice in the Arctic or glaciers in Patagonia and Glacier National Park and make the leap that, "Okay, releasing carbon from long-dead dinosaurs in the form of petroleum and coal results in atmospheric carbon dioxide which warms and expands oceans and makes ice melt."

Not historic (read on about low levels in the Wisconsin), but probably low in the Holocene. Part of the issue (and the reason for "probably") is that plant stoma give a different answer than ice cores. Both methods of determining Holocene CO_2 levels have their problems, but arguably the ice cores have more. Since it is low in the Holocene, yes, they were slowly descending. The climate was cooling, culminating in the Little Ice Age, which is still recorded as being very likely the coldest stretch in the last 11,000 years post the Younger Dryas. Since the ocean takes up more CO_2 as it cools, it is not implausible that CO_2 was as low as it had been for order of 12,000 years, BUT plant stoma show CO_2 level varying by almost an order of magnitude more than ice cores, and with a somewhat different mean behavior. So it is possible that it actually varies naturally on a century timescale by at least 30 or 40 ppm and it wasn't an actual low. Still, both are plausible and supported by evidence.

Plants get very sad (IIRC) at around 160 ppm, which is the level at which mass extinction of at least some kinds of plants becomes possible. During the last glaciation (the Wisconsin) the low-water CO_2 level was around 180 ppm, which is, in fact, really, really close to the critical point. Since carbon tends to be systematically removed from the environment by a variety of processes (such as shellfish growing their carbonate shells and a colder ocean absorbing more) we (the planetary ecosystem) might or might not have been in serious trouble in the next glacial episode. More than the trouble caused by the fact that there are all of these kilometer thick glaciers where things like New York and Montreal are today and the pretty serious effect of global cooling by 5 to 10 C in a stretch of time as short as a century, if we can believe parts of the fossil record and icepack cores from places like Greenland.

Finally, there is absolutely no doubt that plants are much happier with 400 ppm than they were at 280 or 300 or 320 ppm. Plants grow faster, are healthier, and are more productive at higher CO_2 levels. This is known both from lab work (greenhouses with controlled CO_2) and from observations of crop yields and tree growth rates in the real world. Plants would be happier still with 1000 ppm. Over almost all of the last 600 million years, atmospheric CO_2 has been anywhere from 1000 ppm to 7000 ppm. Levels as low as 300 ppm are extremely rare and yes, probably dangerous to the biosphere.

We will now return to your regularly scheduled rants about "warmists" and "deniers" and hatin' "C-AGW" without questioning the "C".

If we were to engage in climate engineering, warming things up and adding a little CO2 is exactly what we'd want to do.It would increase the range of latitudes for food production and mitigate future ice ages, which are much more catastrophic than any effects from warming.

However, at our stage of understanding the system, climate engineering is probably not such a good thing to be doing. The planet isn't an experiment that we can easily clean up after we make a mess. We can't 'nuke it from orbit' just to make sure.

That is a major issue with the carbon sequesters and everybody else. We're really running in the dark. We need to put quite a bit more energy (pun intended) into understanding the system before we blithely go and tinker with it (like we are doing at present).

It would increase the range of latitudes for food productionIt would not. northern and southern latitudes unusable for food production have the dreaded polar day and polar night cycle.It is irrelevant as it leaves a band of deserts closer to the equator anyway. and mitigate future ice agesWow... a thing that might destroy your own property or that of your children - and where you have full control about by reducing CO2 production - is less important than a thing that will happen in 100,000 years and you have no control about?

Needless to say, scientists disagree. Patrick Moore shows he knows little of science when he says "There is no scientific proof." There is very compelling evidence, but there is no such thing as "Scientific proof".

He laughably accuses scientists of being in the pay of vested interests all the while being a PR front for fossil fuel interests such as the Heartland Institute that published this very piece.

His 'argument' amounts to long debunked talking points.

He shows he hasn't read an IPCC report when he says IPCC will "consider only the human causes of global warming". IPCC outlines scientific consensus on all sources of climate change from solar cycles to milankovitch cycles.

He shows he hasn't looked at paleoclimate reconstructions which show that the Earth has been generally cooling for the last 8000 years and that the current temperatures are likely higher than at least the last couple thousand.

The rest of his argument boils down to simple incredulity, which is not very compelling.

He shows he hasn't read an IPCC report when he says IPCC will "consider only the human causes of global warming". IPCC outlines scientific consensus on all sources of climate change from solar cycles to milankovitch cycles.

Yup. That's about the level of 'argument' presented by Patrick Moore. It basically amounts to just making stuff up. Here is the temperature increase over the last 18 and 26 years according to the satellite reconstruction compiled by skeptic Roy Spencer: http://woodfortrees.org/plot/u... [woodfortrees.org] . The warming over the period is considerable. Equivalent to billions of nuclear bombs worth of accumulated energy.

Gazzilions of years ago or whenever it was, when the oil we use now was floating around in the form of giant mats of algae, some belching deadly hydrogen sulfide as they decompose, there was a lot more life on the planet. But do we really want to live on a world choked with so much scum? Over time, that algae turned to oil and the carbon really was sequestered -- but now we're putting it all back into circulation -- I suppose it could become more animals, more corn, more people, but it could also become m

The biggest danger to science is not the US GOP. It's not even the states of Kansas or Texas. Or even Arkansas. It is Greenpeace.

Greenpeace vs. Biology: Species are static in their description vs. species change over time.Greenpeace vs. Physics: Long half-life is more dangerous vs. short half-life emits more radiation over time.Greenpeace vs. Chemistry: Chemicals are bad vs. Everything you eat is a chemical.Greenpeace vs. Environmentalism: Spotted Owls only nest in old growth forests vs. they nest anywhere

Moore breaks with what might be expected of a Greenpeace founder as well in that he is currently chair of Allow Golden Rice.

Well, while he is wrong about climate change, his stance on Golden Rice is pretty well on. We know it works, we know it is safe, Greenpeace still opposes it because they know damned well that their cries of genetic engineering being a dangerous horrible thing that you should totally give them loads of cash to fight are going to look a bit silly when it is saving the lives of thousands of children. It's despicable that they are willing to allow unnecessary death and human suffering in developing countries just to further their careers as professional activists. They're no different than anti-vaxxers who bring back vaccine preventable disease, not in my book. I don't agree with Moore's stance on climate change, but at least he's doing good on this front to bring attention to the harm Greenpeace and other anti-science groups are doing.

I can't tell if you're trolling or not but enough people do believe that keeping people impoverished and hungry is somehow good for them, and that it is somehow ethical to sit idly by and watch and do nothing while people starve just for being born in the wrong part of the planet. It's completely idiotic of course. Everywhere we see a reduction in poverty and increases in the standard of living we see lower birthrates. Do you really think we are going to bring about a greater human development index with

" He argues instead that in a historical context, human activity has saved the planet, declaring that "at 400 parts per million, all our food crops, forests, and natural ecosystems are still on a starvation diet for carbon dioxide."

Our crop are starved from other stuff than carbon. if carbon was the problem only, we would put carbon in our fertilizer. But we don't what provocated an explosion of food production was not the CO2 increase during industrial revolution up to today, but NPK fertilizer (nitroge

I'm still of the opinion that we're dumping too much CO2 in to the air. Although I know that scientists make mistakes, scientific knowledge is never 100% perfect, and that science is a system of incrementally improving our knowledge, I'm not a science skeptic. Climate scientsts are better experts on this topic than I am, science is highly competitive (remember, they all compete for a very limited supply of grant money, so one scientists's failure is another's success, so they want to overturn each other's ideas), and peer-review is effective much more than it is ineffective.

That all being said, a perhaps a more accessible issue people should be talking about is all the other crap we're dumping into the air *besides* the CO2. We're poisoning ourselves. And besides the air, what about junk we're putting into our bodies from other sources, like pesticides, BPA, and all manner of other harmful chemicals?

Ok, so maybe global warming is something that will only kill our great-great-great-grandkids, and we don't care about them. What about the stuff that's killing us right now?

I'm sure there are people here far more knowledgeable about politics, science and other topics than I. I however am moderately versed in all these things and I specialize in cause and effect both mathematically as well as sociologically as a hobby.

1) I'm glad he came forward as a "semi-credible" skeptic. It's time we get someone "on the other side" who will attempt to use gray matter to ponder the mysteries of global warming. Of course, he's a political activist and therefore probably has burned up most of his gray matter and left holes by now, but he poses questions that need to be addressed.

2) Has anyone noticed that there's probably twice as many global warming skeptics that don't even know what it means, but side with the "Right" because they would die before siding with the "Left". I know people who believe strongly that it's Jesus's will that we have this issue and therefore when eggheaded lefties contradict that, it must be gods will to disagree. There need to be people trying to actually ask and answer questions who don't think in terms of "If we evolved from the monkeys why are there still monkey then?".

3) People will side with this guy. He's an egghead they agree with. Let's raise him up as a major scientific leader. Let's not bash him or attack him. Let's reason with him and show his new groupies that we don't have to make this a political left and right thing. It can be more reasonable than that. This is something that should rise above political interests and be delt with.

4) I am not a climate change skeptic.... I believe that since the beginning of time, there has never been a constant climate. I believe it's always changing. I believe we're hellbent on proving that we were right all along and that this chemical or that one must be the specific reason for the climate change. I am inclined to agree with the research I've read in the direction that suggests that CO2 is in fact the primary cause. I however also believe that it seems a little too easy and too obvious. I'm thinking... somehow when there's just that much CO2 rushing up to suffocate us, it feels like a reaction to something we're not looking for. I don't like the idea of trying to scrub the CO2 down without first checking to see, do we need to CO2 to protect us against something else? Was CO2 the lesser of two evils?

5) We have far bigger problems than CO2 right now. We have things like fracking. Don't get me wrong... global warming is very very very dangerous... but I see drinking water as being far more important short term. Do I think we should stop working on climate change? NO!!! We need to address this. We should have trillions of dollars of tax money going into fixing this. But we need to get the damn research done to prove that intentionally attacking the Earth's mantle and intentionally destabilizing it by intentionally cracking it to force it to bleed oil has to stop. I have never in my life dreamed of anything that sounds so impressively stupid as this. The U.S. is in a damn near perpetual clean water shortage in areas where 50+ million people live and now we're destroying even more clean water reserves. This is clearly a problem we can address and we don't. Why the hell isn't fracking a major item on the presidential election agenda?

I think I love this guy. I am so happy he's there and now let's use him for all he's worth. Let's stop attacking him and instead talk with him. Maybe his believers who have raised him to messianic status will follow him because they finally have "a credible scientist" to listen to. Let's educate him so he can educate his people.

Dude if you believe EITHER side gives a single fuck about the environment? I have some genuine Arkansas anti global warming crystals I'll be happy to sell ya, only $499.99 so act now! BTW if you actually DO give a shit about the environment? DO NOT BUY THE SCAMS, talk to somebody that actually walks the walk...Ed Begley Jr [edbegley.com]. unlike Rev Al who lives in a McMansion whose indoor basketball court uses more AC than a family home? He lives in a modest 3 bedroom, Rev Al drives a fleet of SUVs to his one man Lear jet? Begley drives an electric car to a commuter flight.But if you were to look up Begley's thoughts on the subject? You'd find an overdose of COMMON SENSE, make it easier for folks to use electric cars, promote renewables in places like AZ where solar works really well, invest in tech that will let us do more with what we have and recycle easier...its ALL common Goddamned sense!

But of course you can't become a billionaire with sensible logical approaches which is why you are getting pounded with "ZOMFG teh sky is fallin! You HAVE to do this thing (which won't do a damned thing because we filled it with more loopholes for our 1% pals than a Coke has HFCS) because we have to SAVE TEH EARF!"